


afterlife.

by vasnormandy



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Colonist (Mass Effect), F/M, Mass Effect - Freeform, Mass Effect 2, an attempt at tagging was made
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-11
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-12 05:39:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3345584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vasnormandy/pseuds/vasnormandy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>in the eight hundred and thirty-three days that have passed since alchera, he hasn't gone one without wishing he could hear her laugh one more time. he hadn't expected to hear it on omega, across afterlife's red-lit dance floor, from a girl in mercenary armor he hardly recognizes as the woman he knew. || alternate universe, in which shepard's "death" happened a little differently.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_2185 | Afterlife, Omega_

“So I look at him. I look over at his pants, on goddamn fire on the ground half a meter away. I look back at him, and I say to him, I say – well, you’re not bloody well gonna catch a lot of spies with _that_.”

There’s a laugh ready in Shepard’s mouth, spurred upwards by a little more of that fancy asari alcohol than she’d intended to drink tonight. It rings, loud and euphoric, across Afterlife’s main floor, but amid the music and the drinking and a hundred other of Omega’s citizens caught up in the tumultuous dances of their own lives, no one turns to look.

On the barstool next to her, Zaeed Massani shakes his head, a drunken sweeping motion from side to side; he supports himself heavily with a forearm resting on the bar. “I swear, Allison,” he insists gruffly, “you never saw a bloke go redder. All the way down to ‘is balls.” He grabs his glass from the bar, lifts it to his mouth to take a swig only to find it empty. “Oi!” he shouts, in the vague direction of the turian bartender, hefting the empty glass high in the air before slamming it down on the counter with enough force that Shepard starts, afraid for a moment that it would shatter. “Another of ‘em salarian drinks. Those goddamn lizards make bloody good liquor.”

“Or you’re too drunk to tell the difference,” Shepard suggests, sipping from her own glass. “And they’re amphibians.”

He huffs. “Eh. Don’t matter.”

The bartender sets the new drink down in front of Zaeed, and before he can walk off to deal with other patrons, Shepard lifts a hand to get his attention. “Put the rest on my tab,” she tells him. “Alison Gunn. We don’t want Mr. Massani to bankrupt himself.”

“Bankrupt?” Zaeed slurs beside her. “I’m goddamn _rich,_ Al.”

“Not the way you’re going.” She sets her drink down on the bar, half full.

“Least I didn’t pick an alias with the same bloody first name as my real one.”

“You don’t use an alias at all,” she points out. “And it’s not the same. I took an L out of the spelling.”

“Allison, Alison,” he mutters. “Don’t make a difference. Should’ve picked a different name.”

“That’s my problem,” she reminds him. “And I like it.”

“You get your head shot clean off b'cause some idiot finds out who you are, I’m not savin’ your arse.”

“I appreciate the loyalty.” She’s picking up her drink, lifting it to her mouth, when a commotion off towards the middle of the bar turns her head. Shouting, shoving, the sound of glass shattering – there’s a fight starting up. Bar fights are by no means an unusual occurrence in Afterlife, though she feels bad for the poor bastard who started it. People here like to gang up on the instigator – and if that weren’t enough, if they happen to have caught Aria T’Loak on a bad day, her anger could be… considerable.

She learned the rules of this place fast. After a year and a half in and out of Omega, she knows how things work.

“Hey!” Zaeed shouts drunkenly, as though he’s just noticed. “A fight!” Instantly, he gets to his feet, and she puts out a hand to stop him.

“Not in your condition,” she reasons.

“I’ll decide what goddamn condition I’m in, girl,” he growls, pushing past her. “An’ I ain’t had any real fun all day. You comin’?”

She heaves a sigh, and as he turns to throw a punch, she wades in after him. If nothing else, she still owes him. Maybe she’ll break the fight up. Or maybe she’ll make it worse. She hasn’t quite decided yet. It’s that kind of a night.

In the end, she does neither. She gets a few good hits in on anyone who gets in front of her fist before T’Loak’s amplified voice rings across the bar, electronically garbled and notably short on patience, and the combatants disperse almost instantaneously. Some look disappointed (Zaeed included); most don’t look much worse for wear. A few are picking themselves up off the floor, but one of those who went down during the commotion – a human, a man – is barely stirring. Shepard shoots a short glance at Zaeed, just to ensure he isn’t planning on starting a fight of his own, and goes to kneel by the man.

As soon as her eyes land on his face, a shock goes through her. In a moment, she is back in time – her tattoos are gone, her newfound scars, her expensive armor (a favorite among freelance mercenaries); her hair is pixie cut short instead of buzz-cut, the ends of dark caramel-brown curls brushing the back of a neck just a bare shade lighter; she is two years ago, she is two years and three months and twelve days ago; she is happy, she is _Commander,_ she is saluted, she is loved.

Her fingers ghost over his shut eyes, over the bruise blooming on his cheekbone, over the tired landscape of his face; they brush back a strand of his hair. It’s longer than she remembers.

“Al?”

Zaeed’s voice. She turns her head over her shoulder, looks up at him; his gaze is traveling between her and him, and she can see the alcohol-oiled gears in his head turning, trying to puzzle out the relationship he’s looking at.

In an instant, she has made a decision. “Help me get him up,” she tells Zaeed, grabbing an arm and slinging it over her shoulder.

“Why?”

“Nothing good’s going to happen to him if we leave him here,” she points out. “Come on. Help me get him back to the ship.”

“You and your bleedin’ ‘eart,” he mutters, shaking his head as he lurches towards her. “Fine. Alright. You owe me.”

“I already owed you.”

 Zaeed walks around to loop the man’s other arm over his shoulder, and together, the two of them drag him forward, out the doors of Afterlife, across the floor to Omega’s docking bays, up through the airlock and onto her ship.

 _What has he done to himself?_ she has to wonder.

_Nothing worse than anything you’ve done to yourself._

* * *

 

_2183 | above Alchera_

 

The destruction of her ship is far more peaceful than it has any right to be.

You know that old adage – _in space, no one can hear you scream?_ She has no idea where that comes from (an old movie, she thinks), but she’s heard the saying.

Aboard the Normandy, the noise had been deafening. Blaring alarms, explosions rocking the halls, the low-pitched scream of whatever the fuck kind of death ray the ship that attacked them was armed with. It had reminded her of Sovereign – yellow lasers instead of red, but all the same – but most things reminded her of Sovereign these days.

It had been inescapable. She’d had to yell over the battle sounds, over the hundred dismayed alerts flashing from the pilot’s console (who knew the ship had this many different alarms?) for Joker to hear her. It was loud, it was warlike, it was the harsh thrum of her own heartbeat rattling through her skull – it was what she’d trained for. She can remember Anderson talking her through a scenario like this months ago, back when the Normandy was his – before they were even ordered to Eden Prime, she thinks. Before any of this got started. _As their commanding officer_ , he’d said, _your job is to get them all to safety. Onto the escape pods and out of danger. Every last one, Shepard. Then you think about yourself. Only then._

 _Sir,_ she’d said. _I’m only their commanding officer if something happens to you. You planning on going somewhere?_

He’d chuckled. _No. No place I’d rather be._

_Even if we do get our asses blown out of the sky?_

_Even then._

At any rate. It was loud.

It’s not anymore. She can hear the hiss of oxygen escaping her ruptured tank. She can hear her own breathing – shallow, labored, more so by the second. She can hear the harsh thrum of her heartbeat.

But that’s all. Besides that, there’s no sound. She’s watching as explosions tear her ship apart, bright sparks of fire against the black backdrop of space, and she can’t hear them. It’s like a silent film, like it’s not even real, and her breaths are white noise in her ears and she is a spectator. In space, nobody can hear their ship blowing up.

She really loved that fucking ship.

Her eyes move down to the procession of escape pods. The Normandy has six, each one large enough to hold eight people. Five launched. One she knows holds only one occupant: Joker. The other four could hold thirty-two of her crew, but she doesn’t dare to believe every one of them is full. And even then, the Normandy boasted a crew of forty-six, herself included. If every pod launched before Joker’s holds its full eight-person capacity, that’s still thirteen dead.

Herself included.

_Every last one, Shepard. Then you think about yourself. Only then._

She watches the pods drift, the first four clustered (Kaidan is in there somewhere, and Liara, and Garrus), the last lagging behind (Joker is in there, strapped in, surely blaming himself). They don’t have comms, or sublight engines, or anything like that, but they have very powerful distress beacons. The Alliance will come. Everyone who made it off the ship will make it out of this safely.

That, at least, is some comfort.

She looks back to the Normandy to see one of the largest remaining intact pieces crack in two. Such a beautiful ship. Her ship.

She looks away.

The planet she’s above – Alchera, isn’t it? – is a white curve across the black, probably little more than a big, round hunk of ice. Not the greatest final resting place. It isn’t looking like it’ll be hers, though. It might’ve been, had the explosion that knocked her away from the doors of the fifth escape pod blown her towards the planet instead of away from it. She’d be in a decaying orbit. Eventually, she’d hit the surface of the world like a meteor – if she didn’t burn up completely in reentry first. But as it is, she’s drifting away from the planet, not towards it. It’s looking more like a burial at space for her – a long, long afterlife spent drifting, a decaying body in a ruptured suit. Long after everyone she knows is dead and gone, she might still be up here. That’s a funny thought.

Anyway. Hunk of ice it may be, but it’s a nice view from where she is.

A small alert in the corner of her mask informs her that she has less than five minutes of air remaining, and a tinny automated VI voice advises her to make her way to the nearest airlock immediately. She almost laughs. Yeah. Not fucking likely.

The suit tells her she has four minutes of air remaining less than twenty seconds later. So it’s going to be a running countdown, then? Great.

She’s been taking shallow breaths, but – oh, fuck it, what’s the point? It’s not like she’s going to extend or shorten her life more than a few seconds either way. Maybe a minute if she tries really hard. Nothing that’s going to make a difference. She takes a long, deep breath, a blissful gulp of air, and if she closes her eyes and thinks hard enough about anything but this she can almost pretend it’s not one of her last.

Three minutes of air remaining. Fuck. She’s cold. That’s wrong, isn’t it? That shouldn’t be happening. The suit has environmental controls, heaters that make the freezing vacuum of space survivable. Unless those are busted, too. This keeps getting better.

With any luck, she’ll suffocate before she freezes to death.

Two minutes of air remaining. Is it just her, or are the alerts coming faster, closer together?

One minute of air remaining. It’s not just her. The automated voice didn’t even have time to finish impressing the urgency of making her way to an airlock on her before it interrupted itself to give her the new time.

Thirty seconds of air remaining. She swears, if the fucking thing is going to start counting down the seconds – oh, and there it goes.

Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. She tries to take another deep breath, to indulge herself once more, but the air feels thinner. It doesn’t satisfy. Twenty.

Nineteen. Eighteen. Fifteen. She thinks the suit’s system has realized she’s using up air faster than she should be. Whoever programmed this fucking thing should’ve considered that the VI might have to account for suit ruptures. Seems like a pretty obvious malfunction to factor in. Ten. Eight. Five. Two.

She has no air remaining.

In her new vacuum, she drifts.

She’ll cling to consciousness for a little while longer. Back home, on Mindoir, there was a lake close to their settlement, and she used to swim there, her and her brother. She could hold her breath twice as long as he could. At ten years old, she could stay beneath the murky surface, looking up at him through the clear plastic of her goggles, long enough that he would start to worry – if she stayed down until her lungs were screaming, if she could tough out the pain for the sake of a joke. And she could always tough out the pain for the sake of a joke.

She lets out the last breath she took, used-up air hissing quietly outward through her nostrils. She’d come up laughing, gasping for breath, splashing towards him, saying _don’t worry, Christopher; toss me, Christopher, toss me_ , and at thirteen years old and twice her size he’d lift her squirming out of the water and throw her giggling back into it.

She looks back to the clustered escape pods. Kaidan is in there somewhere. Maybe with Liara, maybe with Garrus, maybe with no one he knows well enough to find comfort in. He’ll be worried about her. He’s always worried about her.

Maybe he saw the last pod launch; maybe he’s sure, for now, that she’s okay, that she’s alive, that she made it out in one piece like she always does. Maybe he thinks that he’ll see her as soon as the Alliance picks them up, as soon as they’re all in one place again – that right now she’s just staying under until her lungs are screaming, just staying down for the sake of a joke, but she’ll come up for air laughing in no time at all, ready to throw herself back into danger with a smile on her face. Maybe he saw the pod launch.

She hopes he didn’t, though. That hope would sustain him for now, but it’ll destroy him before the day’s end. She mouths his name, but she does not have the breath to speak.

The world’s going fuzzy, going black. Her lungs are starting to scream. Involuntarily, she begins to struggle again – to claw her way upwards, swim for the surface, for air, for breath, for a laugh from the worried freckled boy with curls the same as hers, for a smile from the worried man who told her he loved her between quiet kisses in empty hallways where no one could hear.

 _Kaidan_ , she thinks, but even the image of him in her mind is darkening. There’s a surge, a rush, like a wave on the shore, like blood pumping in her ears, and it overwhelms her entirely. She’s going, she knows – this is it – that tiny sliver of light still visible, reflecting off the surface of Alchera, that’s all there is. That’s all that’s left. _Kaidan_ , she thinks.

 _Toss me_.


	2. Chapter 2

_2183 |  above Alchera_

 

He’s never been good at hiding how he feels about her.

Not from her. Not from their friends. Not from anyone. He’s sure the crew had their suspicions, but if anyone had ever thought to ask him straight-out if they were more than commanding officer and subordinate, more than battlefield allies, more than war-forged friends, they would’ve been screwed.

Now is no exception. Anxiety is loud in his mind, thick in his throat, overpowering most everything else, and he has to do something, has to move, has to get it out – but he’s strapped into his seat in the escape pod, he can’t get up and pace, he can’t do anything. So he’s been tapping his foot nervously against the floor nonstop since they launched – kneading his hands together, glancing around.

“I’m sure she’s fine, Kaidan,” Liara says from the other side of the shuttle, breaking the silence with the first words said by anyone in a good while.

“I wasn’t –”

“Yes, you were.”

She draws a breath, looks peacefully straight ahead, and he envies her serenity. He’s glad she’s here, anyway. If he had to be stuck in an escape pod floating away from the wreckage of the Normandy with any of the allies Shepard had picked up in their fight with Sovereign, he’d want it to be her. Garrus, in the second to last shuttle they launched, is surely brimming with anger, or worry for Shepard’s sake, or a combination of the two; Wrex, already departed for Tuchanka, is nothing if not agitating. Their presence in tandem with his own anxiety would do little to help him breathe easier. Tali’s company he has sorely missed since she returned to the flotilla, but he’s glad she isn’t here. Seeing this would destroy her. But Liara – Liara is a calming influence.

He gulps down a deep breath, like the one she’d taken, leans back in his seat and tries to mimic her expression – calm, _calm_ , looking straight ahead. But he can’t quite capture the essence of it. Where she gazes vaguely off into the distance, as though waiting patiently for something to appear on a horizon only she can see, he _stares_. His eyes bore heavily into the opposite side of the pod, like he’s trying to drill his way through, like he’s planning how best to start clawing through the metal with his hands.

He has to actively remind himself, for a moment, that escape – however tempting – is not in anyone’s best interests at the moment. Leaping voluntarily into the arms of a quick death by explosive decompression will not bring Shepard back into his any faster.

God, he shouldn’t have left her. He shouldn’t have left. Direct order or no direct order, what was he thinking? If something happens to her, and he isn’t there –

The shuttle has small windows, and he cranes his neck to look through one of them at the wreck. It looks like the mystery ship has come around for a second attack, but after all but cutting the Normandy in two, it’s departing again; it doesn’t seem to have any interest in the tiny lifeboats drifting out of its reach. As he watches, a series of explosions blow a shower of debris out from the shell of the Normandy, and then – wait, no. That larger piece, that isn’t debris. That’s not a broken bit of the vessel he’d begun to call home, propelled helplessly outward by blasts. That’s an intact piece, and it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to.

“A pod launched,” he announces.

Liara sits up straighter, suddenly alert. “Shepard?”

“Has to be.”

She exhales, shuts her eyes, and she’d seemed so tranquil that he hadn’t even noticed how tense she was. “Thank the Goddess,” she murmurs. “Do we have a way to contact her?”

He shakes his head. “Escape pods don’t have comm systems.”

“Why not?”

A shrug.

“That seems a notable design flaw.”

“Tell me about it.” He settles back into his seat, drawing what feels like the first real breath he’s taken since she ordered him off the ship.

“I told you she would be alright,” Liara notes.

“You did,” he agrees. “Thanks.”

“Of course, Kaidan.” He watches her take long, slow breaths, focusing her gaze forward once again with that familiar, impossible calm clear in crystalline blue eyes, and – not for the first time – he wonders what it must be like to live in her head.

A hundred and six years old and still a child. To have all that time behind you, and so much more still ahead – he can’t even imagine.

He knows she felt something, probably feels something, for Shepard. Beyond friendship, that is; beyond camaraderie. She’s even worse at hiding how she feels than he is. Somehow it’s never kept him from being friends with her; he’s never felt overly threatened by it, he supposes. She is beautiful, anyone with eyes could see that – he’s not sure if Shepard swings that way, but he honestly wouldn’t be all that surprised. But she’s calm – she’s serene – she’s a cool, quiet moment of peace in the midst of a war, and he knows Shepard; that isn’t what she finds solace in. Liara is like coming up for air, and Shepard prefers to stay under. Liara is tranquil – _the bookish type_ – and Shepard loves action like she loves nothing else.

And Shepard loves him. He thinks so, anyway. She’s never said.

He inhales – a long, deep breath. She’s in that shuttle. She has to be. There was no one else left alive on the ship when they left, he’s sure of that, or fairly sure, at any rate. Joker couldn’t have made it to the escape pods alone, and regardless, he would not have left without her prompting. It’s the two of them back there. Or – just her, he supposes. Something could’ve gone unspeakably wrong, but she wouldn’t needlessly let herself die because she failed to save Joker. With any luck, it’s both of them, safe as ever – but at the very least, it’s her.

He’s going to see her again, soon. He’s going to see her as soon as the Alliance comes and picks up the escape pods – and they will, the distress signal is broadcasting, and she said they would. He’ll see her, and he’ll pretend he’s less relieved than he is, and as soon as they’re alone he won’t let go of her for hours.

He still can’t quite breathe easily. But he will. Soon.

 

* * *

 

_2185 | M.V. ARGO, Omega docks_

Kaidan wakes with a thrumming in his head and a hooded Japanese girl leaning over him.

He doesn’t notice the latter at first. Wherever he is, it’s brightly lit, painfully so – the moment he opens his eyes, he squeezes them shut again, a groan forming in the back of his throat. Oh, god. Too much asari booze. He’s never drinking alone on Omega again.

Ignoring the headache as best he can – he’s had worse, though maybe never from a hangover – he tries to return to the night, tries to remember what he’d done. Clearly he left the bar at some point, Afterlife is all dim red lights, not bright white ones, and he seriously doubts he could’ve somehow managed to sleep there anyway. But he doesn’t remember leaving. He doesn’t remember much.

Wait. There was – a laugh. A loud laugh from across the bar – rougher than sandpaper, clearer than music, more familiar than his own face in the mirror. A tipsy laugh, a woman’s laugh, a soldier’s laugh, amusement and alcohol glazing over experience. Too familiar. Impossibly familiar.

Maybe a hallucination. He was profoundly intoxicated. But he had to look.

Stumbling drunken across the bar, stumbling through the crowd. His eyes finding, seated at the counter opposite the one where he had been, a woman – the source – she looked like her, maybe, or she could have, in the right light, but here she was in little light at all. The red glow made the color of her skin, her hair, unidentifiable, unrecognizable; where short, tight curls should have hugged her skull, hair was cut, nearly shaved. The lighting illuminated solid black tattoos down the left side of her neck, intricate designs, she never had those – but she’s smiling, smiling at some man, older and scarred and swaying, and the indent pressed into her full cheek churns his stomach.

He’s definitely drunk, he’s definitely hallucinating, maybe he’s already passed out on the bar. It isn’t as though it’s a dream he’s never had before, though perhaps not with these exact details. But all the same – stumbling forward, stumbling towards the woman who looks like her, or could have, in the right light.

Stumbling right into a drunk batarian.

There was – a fight, wasn’t there?

Ooh. He didn’t last long, did he.

Shit, it’s bright in here. The light is shining through his eyelids. Where the hell is he, anyways?

Okay. That seems like a pretty pressing question. So, ignoring the discomfort, he forces his eyes open, and that’s when he notices the girl. She might be young; her face is half obscured by the shadow of her hood, round and full and characterized by the outline of a button nose, a round mouth with a purple line from the center of her bottom lip onto her chin.

Her face is also barely six inches from his.

He almost recoils, but he’s lying down. He has nowhere to jump back to. Instead, he pulls his eyes away from her, focuses them up on the ceiling, and shuts his mouth firmly. This cannot be good.

A smile parts the girl’s lips. “Shep,” she calls over her shoulder. “He’s awake.”

As she straightens up, turns to face the rest of the room, he steels himself, ignores the halved name she uses. He will not dare to hope.

“About time, too,” she continues, speaking to the unseen other in the room, and he recognizes a faint, lilting accent. “You know,” she adds, with a glance back at him, “Jack was right. He _is_ pretty.”

“Kasumi,” the other one says, “give us some space.” Kasumi, the Japanese girl is called Kasumi; he can’t think of anyone named Kasumi with an interest in hurting him, or killing him, or otherwise, but all the same, something along the lines of a kidnapping or hostage situation seems the only likely option. This is what he chooses to focus on, rather than the way his heart was beating at twice the speed it should have been, the way it nearly stopped short at the sound of the voice – familiar hardened diction, familiar smooth intonation. Impossibly familiar. Impossible.

He will not dare to hope.

“Aye-aye, Captain,” the one called Kasumi acknowledges, and her tone sounds teasing, not like that of a soldier recognizing a real superior. Kaidan keeps his gaze fixed on the ceiling, but out of the corner of his eyes, he sees the small hooded figure walk to the door, start to pass through it – and disappear completely halfway across the threshold.

He focuses on the silence. Focuses on his breathing. Tries to focus on anything that will keep his resolve strong, keep him from turning to look at the other figure in the room. He can see her outline now that Kasumi has moved out from in between them; she is tall, lanky, muscled, with light brown skin and her head damn near shaved. She has tattoos, and wears full armor – dark blue with black inlay, devoid of any organizational markings or logos, easily identified at a glance as high-quality. Her figure is right, but the rest is wrong. He will not dare to hope.

And then she speaks.

She doesn’t turn around. She doesn’t look over her shoulder. Her hands are braced on a desk across the room (on further inspection, it looks like a medbay, though notably smaller than the Normandy’s), her head bowed, and she does not move; one moment she is silent, and the next she is inquiring, “Is this your new thing, Kaidan? Getting your ass handed to you in bars on Omega?”

It isn’t possible. It isn’t fucking possible. He will not dare to hope. He will not dare to hope.

“Not that I’m judging,” the woman who cannot be her continues, and fuck, the gently teasing tone in her voice is exactly like he remembers it. “Everybody needs a hobby, but – damn. I remember you used to handle yourself a lot better than that.”

Instinctively, he bristles, almost defensive, and the burgeoning shock he is trying so hard to put to rest has worn down his stubborn silence. “I drank…” Two? Four? More than that. “A lot.”

She huffs. “Yeah, no shit.”

“What do you want?” It’s a kidnapping. It’s a hostage situation. She’s a mercenary, or a slaver, or somebody with a grudge. She’s not her. She’s – not dead enough to be her.

He can almost hear the arched eyebrow in her tone. “Some gratitude there, Alenko. You know how dead you’d be if we hadn’t pulled you out?”

“And you want something in return.” Extortion. He can work with that.

“… _no_.” The emphasis in her tone is palpable, and in the exact same moment, their respective resolves shatter. He tears his eyes away from the ceiling, turns to look at her, just as she lifts her hands from the desk and turns to walk to him. She pulls a chair from the desk as she moves, spinning it around to sit backwards on it, with her legs straddling the back of it and her arms resting on the top.

She looks like her, or she could, with details removed. Her hair is not short and curly. It stands barely half an inch from her scalp, dark but sparse. A series of intricate tattoos, thick and black and almost resembling a circuit board in their design, begins just behind her left ear, continues down the left side of her neck, and disappears into the collar of her armor. She has new scars to join the one that has always split her eyebrow – a gash just beside her right eye, so close that the knife must have barely missed the eye itself, a tiny indent in the tip of her nose where a blade must have carved the smallest bit out.

He looks at the hair, at the tattoos, at the clothing, at the scars, and he sees _Omega,_ just another human girl defiant of the system making her own way on the lawless rock. But he looks straight at her face, straight at her eyes, and he sees _Shepard._

He’s wrong. He has to be. She isn’t her. He wouldn’t believe it if she looked exactly the same as she did the last time he ever saw her.

Even if it is her – _which it isn’t,_ he reminds himself, interrupting his own beginning thought, _it isn’t, it can’t be_ – this woman isn’t the Shepard he remembers. She’s some skewed version, something that hellhole of an asteroid has chewed up and spat back out. She could be anyone. She could do anything.

He doesn’t trust her, is the point he’s trying to make here.

He watches her draw a long breath. “Been a while,” she says.

He doesn’t respond.

“You want something for your head?” she continues, to his silence. “Afterlife liquor will knock you on your ass.”

Tensely, he shakes his head. Training, Kaidan. Kidnapping. Or something. Remember your training.

“Come on, Alenko,” she presses. “Been carried out of that bar a few times myself. It’s not fun in the morning.”

He shakes his head again, and she sighs, gets up from her chair. He keeps his eyes fixed upward again, but he can see her figure moving to a cabinet, rifling through it, and then a small bottle comes flying at him and lands with a soft thump and a rattling sound on the medbay bed beside him. “If you change your mind,” she says, and he doesn’t respond.

She sighs. She shakes her head. She rakes a hand through what’s left of her hair. She rubs her neck anxiously (a habit he remembers watching her pick up from him, but he’s not going to think about that because it isn’t her). She paces the length of the medbay, paces back. He lies in silence, trying not to think about anything but his training.

“I’m gonna be honest here,” she says finally. “I expected a little more yelling, less – silence.”

“What do you want?” he repeats tersely.

“Stop _asking_ that,” she emphasizes, starting to pace again. “This isn’t a fucking kidnapping, Kaidan.”

“It might as well be. Unfamiliar ship. Unfamiliar people.” He’s including her in that, and by the way her step falters, he knows that she picked up on it.

“I’ll vouch for my people,” she says stiffly. “You can trust them.”

 _I don’t trust you,_ he almost says.

His determination falters, and he glances over at her; she’s opening her mouth to say something, and there’s emotion in her face that he recognizes intimately and it tugs at something in his stomach, it deals a crippling blow to his certainty.

And then something explodes.

Not nearby. In the distance. But not far enough in the distance to not be at least a little bit worrisome. His resolve disappears as instinct kicks in and he’s on his feet in a second, his heart rate jumping up into combat mode. Shepard’s – no, not Shepard, she isn’t Shepard – but whoever she is, her mouth closes and her head snaps up, searching for the source as though it’s just outside the medbay door. And then the comms buzz on and a woman’s voice, rough and snide, crackles through the room.

 _“Hey, Shepard,”_ she yells. _“We got shit going down off the starboard side. You better get up here, like – right now.”_

“What’s going on?”

 _“It’s Omega!”_ the voice on the comms shouts back. _“Who the fuck knows?!”_

The woman who can’t be Shepard glances frantically back and forth between the door and him, bites her lip.

_“Come on, Shepard, we don’t have all fucking day!”_

“I have to go,” she says hurriedly. “I’m sorry. I’d explain but I – have to go.”

And, unceremoniously, without another word, she turns and flees the room, and he’s left standing alone in an unfamiliar little medbay on an unfamiliar little ship with his blood loud in his ears.


	3. Chapter 3

_2185 | M.V. ARGO, Omega docks_

 

When she gets up to the bridge, Jack and Kasumi are already there. Kasumi occupies the copilot chair beside Lissa, gloved fingers flying across the holographic interface with rapid ease; Lissa is equally preoccupied in the pilot’s seat, but while her hands move with clear skill and expertise, she lacks Kasumi’s grace. She’s a goddamn ballerina compared to Jack, though, who stalks the cockpit menacingly, pacing the length of it with a dark expression, her arms crossed in front of her bare chest.

“Shepard,” Jack acknowledges when she sees her – her voice is as sharp and unrelenting as ever, but Shepard knows her well; she’s learned to recognize the subtle shift in intonation that indicates relief.

“Oh, good,” Kasumi breathes, without looking up. “We have a problem.”

“I noticed,” Shepard agrees. “What happened?”

“We’re not sure,” Lissa chimes in, urgency pulling her low, tight-strung voice into higher volumes than Shepard is used to from her. “Couple of new ships showed up, someone started shooting, and now there’s a firefight.”

“Must be Tuesday, right?” Jack smirks.

“Must be.” Shepard walks to stand just behind Lissa, looking over her shoulder – she only knows what half the indicators on the pilot’s interface mean, but hey, she knows what half of them mean. “Anybody shooting at us?”

“Not so far,” Lissa reports. “Just a matter of time, I guess.”

“Want me to get on the guns?” Jack offers.

Shepard shakes her head. “We start shooting, we’ll be making ourselves a target. _Argo_ doesn’t have the shields for a firefight like this.”

“I’ve been saying,” Lissa comments, “we need to upgrade them.”

“Yeah, I’m starting to see that.”

“Well, hindsight’s twenty-twenty. For now, though,” the pilot continues, “we need to get out of here.”

“Ellara and Leriven are still ashore,” Kasumi points out, “but we can call them once we’re at a safe distance.”

Shepard frowns. “Leave them behind?”

“They’ll be fine,” she reasons, and it isn’t an offhand dismissal. “Leriven knows Omega ten times better than any of us. And I weep for the poor bastard who tries to take on Ellara.”

“Goto’s right,” Jack agrees, and Kasumi shoots Shepard a self-satisfied smile; getting Jack to openly agree with something is an achievement unto itself. “Ellara’s a tough bitch. Leriven, too. And if we hang around here, we’re gonna get blasted out of the fucking sky.”

“There’s a small Blue Suns fleet on the other side of the system,” Lissa reports, slim fingers flying across the navigational display. “The _Argo_ flags as friendly to Suns ships. We’d be safe there.”

Shepard hesitates, draws a breath. _We don’t leave people behind,_ she remembers Anderson saying to her once, a long time ago, a lifetime ago – first lesson of command, he’d said, when he’d made her his XO: _unless there isn’t a single other goddamn option, we don’t leave people behind._

_The Alliance doesn’t leave people behind,_ she remembers herself saying, to Zaeed, in a Blue Suns hospital wing, more than a year and a half ago now. _They wouldn’t just stop looking; we don’t leave people behind,_ and he’d reminded her that she was a dead woman – she wasn’t Alliance anymore.

_We don’t leave people behind,_ she thinks. _I don’t leave people behind._

_I’m sorry, Ash. I had to make a choice._

“Do it,” she orders, her voice firm, resolute, sure. “Get a message out to Leriven and Ellara the second we’re safe.”

“Will do,” Lissa agrees, and then, just as Shepard was turning to leave the cockpit: “Wait.”

Shepard turns back, an eyebrow lifted. “What now?”

“I’ve been trying to get a read on the attacking ships,” she says. “Not easy. Their transmissions are all triple-encrypted, but lucky for you, I’m damn good at what I do.” She taps the interface a few times more, swipes sideways. “Near as I can tell… they’re Cerberus.”

“Cerberus?” Jack’s voice is acidic – a low, accusatory growl.

“Why would Cerberus attack Omega?” Shepard inquires, her brow furrowing.

Lissa gives a helpless shrug. “Why does Cerberus do anything that they do?” She glances over her shoulder to meet her captain’s eyes just for a moment before turning her attention back to the display. “Why – does this change anything?”

Before she answers, Shepard turns to the cockpit’s other occupants. Kasumi, at some point, vanished without anyone really noticing (not an atypical occurrence), but Jack is there, bristling, her breaths heavy; the look she’s giving her is a plea, begging her to let her get on the ship’s guns, and Shepard’s almost tempted.

“No,” she says finally. “Get us out of here.”

“Shepard –”

“Jack,” she interrupts, before she can go any further. “Gonna get blasted out of the fucking sky if we stick around here, remember?”

For a moment, Jack stands resolute, grinding her teeth through the full flesh of her lower lip. Then, finally, she relents; the tension goes violently from her body, vented outward with a rough, exclamatory sound. “You better be right about this, Shepard,” she warns, pushing past her captain on her way out of the cockpit.

“She’s as pleasant as ever,” Lissa comments – only, though, after Jack is surely out of earshot.

Shepard hesitates. Jack’s history with Cerberus is not common knowledge on the ship, and she can understand why the younger woman would not want it made such. “She’s got a grudge,” she explains, and leaves it at that.

“She’s got a grudge against half the galaxy,” the pilot points out. Again, Shepard tenses, pauses – but coming to her friend’s defense would mean violating her hard-won trust, so she remains silent.

“Making the jump to FTL,” Lissa announces after a moment, her fingers light and nimble on the display. “Hold onto your asses.” It’s a common warning with her, but the _Argo_ – per usual – transitions to FTL flight without a hitch. She’s a small ship, with weapons and shielding significantly below what working for the Alliance gets you used to, but damned if she isn’t reliable. Lissa glances over her shoulder, looking up at Shepard. “We should be in the clear, Captain.”

“Thanks, Liss.” She gives a curt, acknowledging nod. “You see where Kasumi went?”

“Kasumi went somewhere?”

“…Never mind. Thanks.”

She shrugs, turning back to her work. “Sure thing, Shepard.”

 

* * *

 

“Staff Commander Kaidan Alenko.”

His head snaps up – the voice is female, lightly teasing, and doesn’t seem to be coming from anywhere. He wheels around, searching for the source, and a spark of light in the corner of his eye catches his attention. He spins to face it just in time to see the hooded Japanese girl from earlier disable her infiltrator cloak, perched with crossed ankles atop one of the medbay beds with a datapad in her hand.

“Born 2151 in Vancouver, Canada,” she reads aloud. “Enlisted in the Alliance navy at age eighteen. Previously attended the Biotic Acclimation and Temperance training program at Gagarin Station – ooh, I’ve heard about that – ”

“Where did you get that?” he demands.

“I may have hacked your Alliance files while Shep wasn’t looking.” She taps the datapad to scroll to the next page. “Staff… Commander. Congratulations on your promotion.”

“It was two years ago.”

“Well, I wasn’t there to congratulate you then.” She hops down from the bed, saunters forward, and the moment she’s within reach, he grabs for the datapad. But she dances backwards, pulls up her omni-tool, and cloaks – and when he lunges again, he’s grabbing at empty air.

Her giggle rings through the medbay, and he turns to the sound to see her uncloak on the other side of the room. “Too slow,” she chides playfully, lifting the datapad to continue reading. “So, explain this to me,” she says. “If you’re a Staff Commander, does that make you Shep’s equal in rank?”

He swallows hard. He’s trying so desperately to rationalize this, to come up with a logical, believable reason that this girl – Kasumi, right? – would insist that Shepard is alive, that Shepard is here, but he can’t think of anything.

“No,” he says finally. “Staff Commander is a lower rank than full-fledged Commander.”

“Right,” Kasumi agrees, eyes on the orange interface of the datapad. “Whyever that is.” Flippantly, she tosses the datapad aside, looking up to him with her arms wrapped around her torso – he assumes she’s meeting his eyes, but all he can see in the shade of her hood is a tiny glint of light reflecting off of the sheen of her irises. “So,” she begins again. “You’re Shep’s boyfriend?”

“I – ” He cuts off, staring at her with a gaping mouth. Between the bluntness, the lingering trace of the way he trained himself to keep quiet about their relationship (regulations and all), and the obvious, elephant-in-the-room fact that Shepard is _dead_ , he has literally no idea how to respond to that.

She, it seems, takes his silence as affirmation. “I knew it,” she says triumphantly. “Never seen her go all dove-eyed like that before.”

“Shepard isn’t –” _dove-eyed_ , he was going to finish, but he stops himself again. _Shepard isn’t anything. Shepard isn’t alive_.

“And I knew it wasn’t just because you knew her from before,” she continues, ignoring his interruption, “because she was fine when we went to see that T’Soni woman. And they were tight. They used to have, like – asari mind sex or something.”

“That’s not –” _how that works_ , but once again he stops himself as the full meaning of her words sinks in. “She went to see Liara?”

“Well, yeah,” Kasumi confirms. “I mean – it was more of an, _I was in the neighborhood_ thing. See, we took a job on Illium, and she’s –” She stops, bites her lip. “You know what? These are Shep’s stories to tell.”

“She went to see _Liara?_ ”

“Mmm-hmm. I just said that.” She giggles. “I’m thinking you might be lucky you’re pretty.”

“Why –” _Why Liara and not me_ , he almost asks, but he doesn’t know her, and it’s a childish inquiry, and he knows he wouldn’t be able to keep the childish tone out of his voice. _Why does she get to play before she finishes her homework if I don’t? Why does she get the last cookie? Why does she get to see the long-dead love of my life alive before I do?_

He’s not sure how Kasumi interprets his unfinished question, but she pantomimes zipping up her lips, an impish smile pressing dimples into her cheeks. “Shep’s stories to tell,” she repeats.

A sigh pushes past his lips. “Is there anything you _can_ tell me?”

“Most popular safes advertised as ‘uncrackable’ can actually be cracked in under an hour with the right tools and technique.”

“What?”

“You asked if there was anything I could – never mind.” She shakes her head with a small smile, and he cannot help but get the odd feeling that he’s entirely missed the point of the punchline of a very good joke. Lightly, she hops up onto the end of one of the beds, folding her legs and placing her hands in her lap like a pin-up girl. “What do you want to know?”

Where to start? “What ship is this?”

“She’s called the Argo,” Kasumi replies, with what must be a tone of pride. “Like from Greek mythology? With Jason and –”

“I know the story.”

“I picked the name.” Ah. There’s the pride.

“Is it Alliance?”

She giggles. “You can tell she’s not. M.V. Argo.”

Merchant vessel. That covers all manner of sins. “Whose ship is it?”

“Shepard’s,” she responds immediately, as though it were obvious; under the shadow of her hood he’s sure she’s narrowing her eyes at him.

“Shepard’s dead.” His tone is automatic, robotic.

Kasumi gives a light, single-note laugh, almost a chirp. “No, she’s not.”

“She died.”

“Yeah, she told me about that. She didn’t. Everyone thought she did.’

Kaidan opens his mouth and shuts it again. In an instant, he has a thousand more questions – but he settles on a baffled, “She – faked her death?”

Not that that makes any more sense than any other possibility here.

“Mmm.” Kasumi purses her lips, tilting her head noncommittally to the side. “ _Faked_ makes it sound intentional. It just kind of happened that way.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand anything that happens to Shepard. It’s kind of something you get used to.”

He huffs an echo of a laugh – she isn’t wrong. He’s quiet for a moment, and then he asks, “Where is she now?”

“She was up on the bridge when I left. She’s got captain-y stuff to do.” She drops down from the bed, so light on her feet that she does not make a sound as she touches the ground. “I’m sure she’ll be back.”

She cloaks on her way out, and he watches the door open and close on what looks like empty air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the irregular updates. Classes have been kicking my ass, and most of my writing energy is going into a Dragon Age project I'll hopefully be announcing soon. Hopefully I'll be able to get this fic back on track soon, but no promises.


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